10(+) MORE architects i have been thinking about

(Viewing towers are the worst though, somehow!)

architecture photography is a hell of a field

― mh, Thursday, 7 June 2012 20:27 (2 months ago)

Might I recommend the pretty (if boring) Julius Shulman Documentary Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman?

Also since I've spent a couple of days up and down by this building this weekend I have been thinking about (and cussing the budget panel that approved such an ugly monolithic building):

http://www.theccd.ie/images/rotate/ccd-day.jpg

Kevin Roche, you should be ashamed. Actually that entire stretch at the moment is a bit shameful with the empty Anglo Irish building...

http://politico.ie/images/politico/economy/anglo-shell.jpg

I really loved the Kevin Roche exhibit I saw at the National Building Museum last month but it really glosses over some of the terrible things he's done and influenced (on the planning side even more than the aesthetic side).

http://www.dezeen.com/2012/09/01/united-states-pavilion-at-the-venice-architecture-biennale-2012/

USA pavilion at the Biennale is I guess a wry commentary on the difficulties wheelchair users face in the built environment

I already hawked this to I Love Photography, but FWIW I am finally starting in with the 2012 "adventure" photos, this time beginning with a chronologically-organized look at Alvar Aalto. This means opening with the "awkward early stuff for fans only" material but maybe it'll be of interest to some people here. First image here, following ones to the "left" in the Flickr interface. (I only recently realized you could just use the arrow keys to get around - whee!)

Highlights of the limited stuff posted so far:

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8456/8025427165_2ccc1065a0_z.jpg

Seinäjoki Defense Corps Buildings, 1924-1926

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8456/8025614912_27c6e26a16_z.jpg

Villa Väinölä, 1926

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8038/8030089021_488d462781_z.jpg

Turun Sanomat Building, 1928-1930

(2010 and 2011 "Adventure" collections coming, uh, someday. Just ordered a new film scanner the other day...)

that Turun Sanomat photo is great! Did you make it to the Savoy restaurant?

Thanks! And nope, sadly. On the trip it felt like we must have seen every Aalto building known to man, but, turns out, guy built a LOT....

I watched this film over the weekend: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1233611/

I'm kind of considering a desert/Palm Springs road trip/architecture tour sometime. Has anyone been out that way? It looks like a lot of Palm Springs city buildings are of the period.

I also ended up watching Urbanized (finally) and the contrast between people in the two films who have a love of architecture and an interest in its relation to the surrounding environment juxtaposed with a Phoenix, Arizona house arrangement is depressing.

There is a Modernism Week they hold out there, next one is Feb 2013. this past one included a lautner house tour that looked good, but i just couldn't work up the enthusiasm to go out there (also, the weekend tour sold out pretty quickly).

https://www.modernismweek.com/

thinking of taking my ridiculous architect friend, doing the reverse F&L In Las Vegas drive, go see some architecture

Looks like a lot of the home tours are already sold out. There's probably a guide (or maybe use the Gerbhard/Winter So Cal one) that you could do on your own.

Gebhard, that is. It's about a 2-2.5 hour drive for me, but I've never tried just driving out and looking around.

Sounds like a good thing to do if you're bored on a Saturday!

http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/509

upcoming Lebbeus Woods exhibit at SF MOMA

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/oscar-niemeyer-brazilian-architect-died-17890045

Rest in peace, Oscar Niemeyer - 1907-2012. The last heroic Modern.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/arts/design/ada-louise-huxtable-architecture-critic-dies-at-91.html

damn, Niemeyer and now Ada Louise Huxtable, all the greats I thought would live forever are going. When all is said and done I don't know if there will be any 20th century architects seen to have changed architecture more than Huxtable's writing.

[http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/509

upcoming Lebbeus Woods exhibit at SF MO MA

We are almost finished with this show, it is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G

opens saturday
please don't touch, the models are disturbingly fragile (every one arrived broken)

how can you even tell if a Lebbeus Woods model is broken

It made for a very difficult conservation task.

Planning on seeing this when I'm in SF on vacation in March (please do not break them before then)

Guys, this Woods thing at SF MOMA is so awesome

lebbeus?

Of course!

http://www.archdaily.com/346374/can-we-please-stop-drawing-trees-on-top-of-skyscrapers/

TRUTH

Hahaha, totally. Also I would live in terror of branches, or whole trees, ripped loose and careening down 50 stories to the street. Would make a good moment in a disaster, superhero, or shit Transformer movie, but otherwise, yikes.

Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas in the 1970s

http://25.media.tumblr.com/a4f39c2e50dad17a667faa6a63776b38/tumblr_mlf9qcFGoD1qdi0ydo1_500.jpg

DEMONS

haha yeah, love young Rem

http://www.tomorrowstarted.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Architects-rem-koolhaas-young-480x651.jpg

late 60s?

http://www.dorothyalexander.com/assets/architects/Koolhaas%20Harrison/Harrison%20Koolhaas500px.jpg

with dear old Wallace Harrison, 1977

http://archpaper.com/uploads/arch_institute_07.jpg

Ken Frampton & Peter Eisenman, 1970

http://sma.sciarc.edu/wp-content/uploads/video_pimages/1528_tschumi_bernard-1978_2of2.jpg

Bernard Tschumi, 1978

http://www.marvin.com/images/architectchallenge/2013/showdown/0873/02_Vermont-Mountain-House-2_412x273.jpg

My best friend’s firm is competing in the following contest.

I think about her work a lot. If you like it, you should vote for M4rcu5 Gl3y5t33n Architects.

My ongoing obsession with Roosevelt Island has put Josep Lluís Sert back on my radar:

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5530/9217686723_9148b604b6_z.jpg

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7342/9226352450_5e005300f2_z.jpg

Lots more pics linked from my sprawling Roosevelt Island Flickr project starting here but also check out his buildings at Harvard - best kind of Brutalism perhaps. Real presence in these, good sense of relief and texture.

Cool photos. I have a vague obsession with Roosevelt Island too - probably from watching Nighthawks as a kid. It's the only place in the states I've been that feels Soviet - especially in winter.

Thanks! Yeah, it's so unusual as a world in the States, even most other big urban renewal schemes of that period don't have that kind of sequence of spaces. Apparently it also was a shooting location for the Bruce Willis/Tracy Morgan picture Cop Out but I haven't seen that so I have no idea what exactly it looks like. The tramway seems to figure incidentally in a lot of movies (notably Spider-Man) but I think the only thing really "set" on the island is Dark Water which I've heard good things about...?

check out his buildings at Harvard - best kind of Brutalism perhaps. Real presence in these, good sense of relief and texture.

Can totally get behind this - love the Holyoke Center and Peabody Terrace (skip-stops, neighborhood hatred, and all). It was a great experience to interact with these places long before, during, and after a design education - what seemed like some uneasy but mysteriously lively spaces came to seem like little miracles of civility wrought out of HVD hegemony.

I think the only thing really "set" on the island is Dark Water which I've heard good things about...?

I haven't seen the original version to compare, but i liked it. Check it out, especially with the R.I. connection.

Thanks! Yeah, it's so unusual as a world in the States, even most other big urban renewal schemes of that period don't have that kind of sequence of spaces.

It has much more of a European feel to it. I think the (lack of) topography just forces the design to be far more mindful of space (horizontal and vertical). Most big urban projects of that era had the advantage of sprawl - and a "blight" rubber stamp to make what space you needed.

By the way, I'm reading this:

http://www.bloomberg.com/image/iWrpVwiTNT0I.jpg

and it's pretty great. Recommended if you're at all interested in this type of thing. Some background...

How RAND Program, Fire Chief, New York Elites Burned Down Bronx

Back in the 1970s, celebrities of all stripes, from President Jimmy Carter to Mother Teresa, would visit the South Bronx to shake their heads over how the greatest city in the U.S., or a significant part of it, all of a sudden looked like Berlin in 1945.

Fires and demolition took such a toll, as Joe Flood recounts in his book “The Fires,” that the police station once known as Fort Apache was dubbed “Little House on the Prairie.” It was as if some unseen lumberjack had clear-cut entire neighborhoods.

“The Fires” is the latest book to explain how New York City got that way. Ken Auletta’s “The Streets Were Paved With Gold” (1979) is another one. The grand-daddy of them all is Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” (1974).

The focus of Flood’s book is how fire chief John O’Hagan used computer technology to determine which firehouses to close during the administrations of John V. Lindsay and Abraham Beame. Curiously enough, they were almost all in poor neighborhoods.

This is promising new ground -- I’m not sure I ever read about the RAND Corp.’s foray into urban planning before. Yet it is a small story, almost a footnote, compared with Flood’s main theme, which is the destruction of a city by its elites, dating as far back as the days of police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt and muckraking journalist Jacob Riis.

That sounds good!

Roosevelt Island is something of a special case from the get-go though - the planners and the policy-makers (not to say the financiers) were committed to doing Something Different from most urban renewal. The thinking was that the island's desirable location and lack of an existing population to piss off made it possible to do something - close proximity of lower- and middle-income housing - that would not have been possible elsewhere. And Johnson & Burgee's master plan wasn't forced into the 'main street' concept - it was something they wanted to do as a corrective to mainstream modern planning. (Johnson would later call it his "Jane Jacobs phase"). There was definitely space to do more of a towers-in-a-perk thing; Victor Gruen actually proposed an alarming wall-of-slabs a few years earlier.

Some good background in terms of design/urbanism is online here: http://www.rioc.com/devhist/New-York-1960s-Chap-8-1977.pdf

And if you have ProQuest access or the equivalent, look for Yonah Freemark's "Roosevelt Island: Exception to a City in Crisis," in the Journal of Urban History - great background on the public policy issues, the evolving financial situation, Lindsay vs. Rockefeller vs. Nixon vs. George Romney etc. Good stuff.

Thanks for the leads.

BTW, the Pruitt-Igoe Myth is streaming on Netflix. If you're at all interested in this stuff, it's an amazing documentary.

Agreed, that is well worth a watch. I really appreciate how non-architectural it is - really avoids blaming the buildings for what happened and focuses on the money, the structure of the program, etc.

V. excited to be teaching a studio on P-I this year - that film will definitely be a key source.

The essay it takes its title from is also super good, I'm sure you know about that one though.

Can anyone here recommend some history of architecture grad programs in the US? I have a friend, a young Chilean architect, who is interested. She's mostly into modern and contemporary stuff, and also digs urban studies. If she had her way, it would be either in the northeast, California, or Chicago.

Sorry if this isn't exactly on topic, but I could think of no better place to ask.

Is your friend looking for a masters or a PhD? There are a lot of the latter, fewer of the former. Every so often I wonder if I should have looked into one of the two-year (ish) masters of criticism/history/theory/curation (they tend to be kind of catch-all programs), however you'd need to shop around carefully with those. Most of them are not funded in anything like the way PhD programs tend to be, and you have to be ready to aggressively mobilize the degree into some kind of funky hybrid career, although if you also had a convincing career as a designer then that might be enough to get a teaching position. Many of them really are pitched as pre-PhD programs. On the one hand I think that would have really helped me now as I'm working on my PhD - good way to get up to speed on a lot of the key names, debates, intellectual frameworks etc., so that your head's not spinning and you can get down to business. Also it would help you come in the door with a project already fleshed out. On the other hand, it's two more years of school. Anyway, if she was interested in something like that, I don't know where all of them are, but the sensible thing would be to look for schools that offer the PhD since that suggests they'd have the back bench of faculty to support the masters.

If she's thinking PhD, there are plenty of options and it depends on the intellectual climate she's interested in, which means scouring the faculty listings and the recent dissertations to feel out the milieu. I've settled into my program well (C0lumb14) but there was a little bit of whiplash at first and if I'd had infinite time in the year before applying I would have liked to at least skim a few articles by all the PhD committee members at all the schools on my shortlist just to really understand what the vibes were there. But realistically that's very hard to do.

Thanks Doctor, that's actually quite helpful. She was leaning more towards the masters, but may end up having to look at PhD's, due to the scarcity of the former. She's got an uphill road it looks like, esp. because she's looking to get a scholarship, and she's a foreign student.

FWIW I would say offhand that my program has a substantial foreign contingent and that all students have the same base level of funding, plus what people pick up through teaching gigs additional to what's required in the first few years. I can't speak to other schools but generally PhD programs have some kind of base funding package based on teaching or other assistantship work.

The real thing to think about is exactly what kind of career she's imagining herself having, or put in less ugly terms, why she thinks she needs the degree. I don't say that to discourage anyone because I think everybody should have graduate degrees in architecture! This might just be a hangover from the "what am i getting myself into" grad school thread and various associated bummed-out education/career prospects/debt threads.

The real thing to think about is exactly what kind of career she's imagining herself having, or put in less ugly terms, why she thinks she needs the degree.

Good question, DC. She wants to be a professor!

worst project of the year nominee

http://knstrct.com/2013/08/22/intoxicating-swagger-torontos-king-blue-condominiums/

Have any ilxors been to or are planning to go to Palm Springs Modernism Week? I want to, one of these days.

I haven't been but a friend is going for a 3rd time in a row, loves it